Some brilliant internet person has discovered that if you take the Garfield out of Garfield comics, they get a whole lot more entertaining (in a bizarre sort of way). [ link ]

AC tried to convince me that when the rugrat arrives, we’re going to split everything 50-50. Everything. Luckily I found this educational website full of important parenting tips, which totally gets me off the hook. [ link ]

So, I know I haven’t been so awesome on the prompt EuroTrip updates. My bad. But I have to interrupt your irregularly scheduled program for the following public service announcement. Dumpling House Restaurant, of 328 Spadina Ave, in Toronto, is now closed. Closed because sometime today, it failed a City of Toronto Public Health Inspection. It failed this inspection miserably - so badly that a Health Hazard Order was involved, and the proprieter was issued a summons. It failed, in short, because of rats:

But wait. It gets worse. You see, today I dined at this fine establishment. Today. Today I had lunch at Dumpling House. The same day that it failed a City of Toronto Public Heath Inspection. The same day that a Health Hazard Order and court summons was issued. The same day that rats were witnessed, scurrying about with their little rat feet over top of the table where delicious dumplings are formed. Delicious rat-contaminated dumplings.

I finished lunch at 1:30pm. The first comment on this blog post that broke the rat story was posted at 4:06 pm. So the shutdown was maybe at 3pm? A scant hour-and-a-half delay, and I might have witnessed the shutdown in action. I might have been sitting there, dumpling in hand*, when a crack team of Public Health Inspection officers came sliding down by rope from the Official Public Health Rapid Response Team helicopter, crashing through the window, while megaphones blared “put down the chopsticks and step away from the pan-fried lamb” **.

Or, perhaps, I simply would have arrived after the shutdown, and missed out on the rat-contaminated dumplings entirely. Of course, then this post would not have been written. And, I would be feeling distinctly less queasy about the whole thing. It’s always a trade-off, I guess.

News travels fast - even the National Post is blogging about the Dumpling House rats. The proprieter of Dumpling House is quoted, stating that it is not Dumpling House in particular that has a rat problem, but the City of Toronto as a whole. Well, clearly, yes, there are many rats in downtown Toronto. But the rats inside the window, contaminating the dumpling preparation area? Definitely a Dumpling House problem.

The worst part is, now the lab has to find a new dumpling place…

* In fact, I do not eat dumplings with my hands. But “dumpling pinched precariously between two chopsticks” wasn’t really working, sentence-wise…

** This is how I imagine a Public Health shutdown happens. The more likely “man-with-clipboard” scenario hardly does the situation justice, in my mind.

In June of 2007, I took an impromptu trip to Germany, which led to a wacky European adventure. This is my story…

When we left off last time, I had just arrived in Saarloius, a tiny town near the border between Germany and France. AC and I stayed in a quaint little hotel called the RATSKELLAR. Sounds cozy, no? Actually the RATSKELLAR was pretty nice, it had a little patio which overlooked the town square (yes, a town square!). Unfortunately, the town square had been completely torn up for renovations, and construction started at 7 in the morning. That meant I was always up in time for the complimentary RATSKELLAR breakfast, also known as Frühstück. Unlike those lame North-American “continental” breakfasts (ie muffin and OJ), this was a hearty German breakfast, with a wide assortment of breakfast meats. Actually I was a bit taken aback by the meat selection - generally I consider bacon and sausages to be the only permissible breakfast meats. But this is not the German way. They did have toast, though, so I managed to keep from starving.

After breakfast I usually hid in the hotel room, fighting off jet lag and avoiding the Saarlanders, who generally didn’t speak a word of English. Also, as a very small town in rural Germany, there wasn’t exactly a lot to see in Saarloius (like I said, the town square was being renovated). I did venture out a few times, to restock the tiny fridge in our room. These grocery missions inevitably ended with me staring blankly at the cashier and holding out money in response to whatever German-questions she asked. Since Saarloius is kind of off the beaten track, the cashiers didn’t seem to have a lot of experience identifying non-German-speaking tourists based on the tried-and-true “please just take the correct amount of money from my hand” gesture. Instead, there would be an initial period of awkwardness, where it was clear that the cashier was trying to decide if I was retarded or just messing with her. I assume she eventually went with “retarded”, because she always seemed to give back the right amount of change.

Perhaps you can now imagine why I avoided leaving our room in the RATSKELLAR.

Other than a minor traffic mishap, in which I was nearly run down by a car driving backwards as fast as many drive forwards, my time in Saarloius was uneventful. AC and I had a nice dinner at an outdoor restaurant, with a waiter who spoke English because he had recently abandoned a failed acting career in Los Angeles. This was nice for AC because he understood the concept of a “vegetarian” dinner. At one point, I also ventured into a coffee shop to get a latte, which I prompty spilled all over the counter. The barrista said something gruff-sounding in German which I took to mean “don’t worry about it, dear customer, I will deal with your mess”, so I made a rapid escape.

Tune in next week, when we get kicked out of our hotel and then flee across the border to France.